Wednesday, June 07, 2017

Winter underway

With the end of the track season at the start of April, attention turned to cross country. The week before cross country season started was the O’Keefe Ekiden Relay. This year, I again competed as part of a team from our athletics club, this time running a 3km leg, which I finished in 13:52. Our team won again, improving on last year’s time by 15 seconds, We now hold both the record and second fastest times for this event.

My cross country season has been very consistent, with the majority of runs falling within a narrow range of 3:34 - 3:38 for the 1km event, pretty much on my handicap time of 3:35. The exceptions were:

Last week at the Bendigo Uni invitational - 3:43. In this event, my time was affected by a large starting field, including many kids who got in the way for the first 200m.

So far, 3:30 seems to be a real challenge to break.

Also last week, there was an out of season track meet. In cold conditions, I got the following times:

100m - 13.24

200m - 27.21

800m - 2:44

In addition, I competed in discus and javelin, throwing around my usual range. My starts in the sprints were a little sluggish, most likely a combination of lack of practice, along with the cold weather.

On a training note, last week, I did some starting practice and made some major improvements to my starts, improving even beyond my performances back in March-April. Next season will be interesting.